Death in Winter

by Michael Jan Freidman

  Had Decalon and his comrades still been inside, they would have been killed—or at the very least taken prisoner. Their mission would have ended as abruptly as Doctor Crusher’s. And the Kevrata would have been no closer to salvation than the day the Federation learned of their plight.

  Phajan, the Romulan thought. The name was like a dagger in his side, causing him pain with every breath.

  How could he have been so wrong? How could he have misjudged his friend’s character so badly? And how vehemently I argued when Picard insisted on leaving Phajan’s house. If the others had listened to him, they would have ended up cursing him.

  Decalon needed to redeem himself somehow, to prove that his inclusion on the team hadn’t been a mistake. He could only hope he got the opportunity.

  Making sure no one could see or hear him as he huddled in the doorway of an old warehouse, Manathas removed a device from an inner pocket in his thermal suit.

  It was small but powerful, as powerful as the communications transponder on any warbird. Had his employer been any less influential, he would never have been able to get his hands on such sophisticated equipment.

  Fortunately, his employer was the single most powerful individual in the Empire. However, she was also the most demanding, and what she wanted was information.

  Which Manathas would now give her. Opening a channel on a prearranged frequency, he kept his mind focused on his message—and not the disease that was running rampant inside him—and began transmitting to Praetor Tal’aura.

  “Glory to the Empire,” he said, “and the praetor, and all she does on the Empire’s behalf.” It was the ritual opening expected of him; to skip over it would have been impolitic, to say the least.

  “We have captured a human physician,” he said, “an agent of the Federation sent to cure the Kevrata of their plague.” He glanced at his hand, where the lesions seemed to be growing in number and intensity. “Unfortunately, it is no longer solely the problem of the Kevrata. A strain of the disease has begun to affect the Romulan population here as well.”

  Manathas neglected to mention that he was one of them. If he did, Tal’aura might wonder if he was placing his own interests before hers.

  “The human has given me reason to believe she can cure the Romulan strain of the disease. This, it seems to me, may be even more important to us than crushing the rebellion on this world.

  “Yet Commander Sela appears not to grasp this possibility. She still wishes to destroy the physician. Fortunately, I have removed the prisoner from Sela’s grasp and hidden her where the commander will not be able to find her. All I need now is a vessel on which to transport the physician to Romulus.”

  It was a reasonable request—one he was certain the praetor would grant. It was just a question of how long it would take for the vessel to arrive from some nearby world—one already in Kevratas’s star system, if luck was with him.

  Had Tal’aura been Manathas’s only patron, he would have put the communications device away at that point. However, Eborion was waiting to hear from him as well.

  Keying the device to another channel, the spy repeated some of what he had told Tal’aura: that he had wrested the doctor from Sela and hidden her where the commander wasn’t likely to find her. Then he added that he had undermined Sela’s influence with Tal’aura in accordance with Eborion’s wishes.

  He refrained from discussing the Romulan variant of the plague. It was the kind of information that Eborion might let slip, and if he did, the praetor would be interested to know where the nobleman had heard it.

  “I will keep you abreast of further developments,” he told Eborion. Then he did put the device away.

  Earlier in his career, Manathas would have choked on the idea of serving two masters. And if one of them was the praetor of the entire Empire? He would have recoiled from the notion as from a Vobilite rock-serpent.

  But not now, he thought.

  It was a dangerous game he was playing, no question. More dangerous than any he had ever played before.

  However, it was critical that he secure a future for himself while he was still able to do so. And that meant accepting as much as he could as often as he could, from whoever was willing to offer.

  Ironic, wasn’t it? Tal’aura had hired him to keep an eye on Sela, whose loyalty—at least on the surface—was beyond reproach. But it was really Eborion whom the praetor should have hired someone to keep an eye on.

  And yes, Manathas conceded, on me as well.

  He wouldn’t have put it past Tal’aura to do that—to hire a second spy to look after the first. But he couldn’t let the possibility bother him, or he would lose sight of more certain challenges.

  After all, it might be days before a ship arrived for Manathas and his captive. If they were to survive, they would need food and drink, and extra clothing. And Manathas had to obtain those items now—disease or no disease—before Sela’s spreading net of centurions made it too difficult.

  With that in mind, he left the shelter of the doorway and set out for the nearest Kevratan supply house.

  Beverly woke with her face pressed against the cold marble floor and her hands tied tightly behind her back. Her feet, she discovered, were bound as well. It seemed her centurion “friend” had found something dark, strong, and rubbery, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was.

  He had done her one favor, at least. The ache in her head wasn’t as bad as it could have been, so he must have kept his disruptor impact to a minimum. I’ll have to remember to thank him, she mused.

  But it would be infinitely better if she could escape before the Romulan came back, and to do that she would have to at least free her feet. Unfortunately, there was no way she could get her hands in front of her—not with her wrists so securely bound together.

  Pursuing her only other option, Beverly bent her legs up behind her and reached down with her hands until she could feel her ankles. Then, though she couldn’t see any of the knots, she started digging at them with her fingers.

  It was slow work under any circumstances, but the gloves she wore made it even slower. Despite the protection they offered her, she pulled them off finger by finger. Then she resumed her task.

  And she reminded herself that whatever hardships she had to endure, whatever prospects she had to look forward to, they were nothing compared to the plight of the Kevrata.

  There might have been a hundred thousand of them in the capital alone, all dying horrible deaths. Some were dying quickly, some so slowly that it might have seemed they were immune. But all of them were dying, just as surely as Jojael and her comrades had died years earlier on Arvada III.

  Beverly remembered how awful it had been to watch them yield to the bloodfire. One by one, moaning and wheezing, crying out for help the colonists couldn’t provide. She recalled the look in their eyes, the sorrow and the dread, but most of all the surprise—because they had truly believed the Federation could do for them what the Romulans would not.

  Doctor Baroja had been wrong about the medical supplies—as it turned out, they were more than sufficient to take care of the Kevrata. But that was because the last of them died so quickly, medicines or no medicines—more than a dozen of them in the space of one wild and hideous night.

  Normally, Beverly would have been asleep by then. But she was too busy running from bed to bed, delivering hyposprays or trying to comfort the Kevrata as they battled the monster eating them from within. The last of the aliens went under a couple of hours after dawn, claimed by the disease he had brought with him from his homeworld.

  Jojael had been among the earliest to succumb. However, her travail had been less painful than most. Beverly was grateful for that.

  Zippor, the botanist who served as administrator of the colony, looked at the bodies of the Kevrata with tired, red-rimmed eyes and muttered something about the Federation medical vessel assigned to the crisis. With the aliens no longer in need of the team’s services, Zippor intended to contact the ship and tell their
captain to turn back.

  But he didn’t—because Doctor Baroja was wrong about something else, besides the sufficiency of the medical supplies. Before noon of the same day, Bobby Goldsmith’s father found a collection of tiny bumps on the back of his hand—bumps that weren’t there before the arrival of the Kevrata. And to the horror of everyone in the medical dome, they were a lot like the bumps the crash victims had displayed before they died.

  A tricorder scan confirmed it: Bobby’s father had contracted the disease. And if one human could catch it, they all could. And theoretically, so could the nonhumans in the colony.

  Doctor Baroja, who seemed to turn to stone at the news, whispered that the virus must have mutated—that what had seemed so common and relatively harmless to his species had overnight become something potentially deadly.

  So it was no longer advisable for Zippor to tell the medical ship to turn back. The only question at that point was whether the colonists would survive to see it—because the medicines they had used to treat the Kevrata were now indeed in short supply, much too short to keep an entire colony alive.

  Doctor Baroja had already begun to discuss the allocation of those medications—and whether they should go to the youngest and strongest or the worst afflicted, because they couldn’t go to everyone—when Beverly’s grandmother guided her out of the medical dome into the thick, oppressive heat of morning.

  At first, Beverly thought it was because the talk inside the dome was getting too grim. But that didn’t make much sense. She had already seen things far grimmer the night before, things none of the other kids in the colony had seen.

  Then Beverly realized that her grandmother had something else in mind, because she didn’t stop when they got outside the dome. They kept going in the direction of their house.

  Beverly asked why her grandmother was taking her home, and Felisa Howard said it would become apparent in a moment. When they reached their domicile, the older woman didn’t go to the front door. She skirted the structure and went out back, where her garden was glistening in the glare of their star.

  “A long time ago,” said Felisa Howard, in words Beverly would never forget, “long before synthetic drugs and hyposprays, our ancestors treated their problems with tubers and leaves. That’s what we’re going to do.”

  Beverly had never known such a thing was possible. As it turned out, she wasn’t alone in that regard. No one else in the colony put any credence in Felisa Howard’s idea.

  But the woman proved that her notion was based in wisdom. In the dark days that followed, she studied the medicinal uses of herbs and roots. Then she ravaged portions of her garden, ground their contents into pulp, and administered it to those colonists who began to show symptoms.

  They used the remaining supply of medicines too, of course. But it wasn’t long before they were relying exclusively on what Felisa Howard could dig up.

  It wasn’t enough—not nearly. Colonists died slow, agonizing deaths. Bobby’s father was among the first. Then Bobby himself caught the disease.

  Beverly tended to him every chance she got, day and night. Mostly, he complained of being chilly, of feeling the cold invade his bones the way it had on Sejjel V.

  As bad as he felt, Bobby seemed to like all the attention Beverly gave him. He told her how much he wanted to get better, so he could take another walk with her at dusk.

  But that wouldn’t happen. The day before the Federation medical team arrived, Bobby died—with Beverly holding his cold, cold hand in her own.

  She went on holding it until someone took it away and embraced her, and sent her outside to collect herself. But even in the hot Arvadan sunlight she could feel the chill of Bobby’s hand, a piece of the winter he had carried inside him.

  Beverly had sworn then that no one would die that way again if it was in her power to prevent it. And over time, she managed to keep that promise.

  But now she had another promise to keep. And I can’t do it until I untie these damn knots….

  Pug Joseph stopped for a moment to shift the weight of the biomolecular scanner on his back, then fell back into his plodding forward rhythm.

  The scanner had been heavy from the moment he picked it up. But now that he had lugged it around some cold, dank tunnels for an hour, it seemed that much heavier.

  “When was the last time you moved your camp?” he asked Jellekh, the Kevrata trudging along beside him.

  “Three days ago,” came the response. “But that’s a long time for us to remain in one place.”

  “How often do you normally move?”

  The Kevrata shrugged. “Every two days. Sometimes less, if we think the Romulans are getting too close.”

  “We have no choice,” said Kito, the Kevrata just up ahead of them. “Unless we want the resistance to die a bloody death.”

  Kito was new to the group. He tended to be a little more graphic than Jellekh and the other veterans.

  “Have they ever found you?” Joseph asked.

  “Once,” said Jellekh.

  But he looked away, obviously less than eager to talk about it. Sorry that he had made his companion uncomfortable, Joseph dropped the subject.

  Looking back over his shoulder—an awkward maneuver with the scanner strapped to his back—he spotted the captain in the back of the procession. Picard was walking backward, his phaser trained on the darkness behind them.

  But then, the rebels were terribly vulnerable while they were laden down this way. They needed a little firepower fore and aft, in case they ran into trouble.

  Joseph couldn’t see Picard’s face, but he had studied it enough over the last few days to know what was on the man’s mind—in addition to a Romulan ambush, of course.

  He was thinking about Beverly.

  When Joseph visited the Enterprise-D, he was too wrapped up in his alcoholism to notice Picard’s feelings for the doctor. Or maybe back then, they just weren’t as obvious.

  But here and now, they were hard to miss. Every time Beverly’s name came up, the captain’s expression changed. And it wasn’t just a matter of concern for a longtime comrade.

  Pretty clearly, it was more than that.

  Joseph wished he could ease Picard’s mind. He wished he could say with something more solid than blind optimism that Beverly was alive, and that they would get her back.

  But all he could do was root for Greyhorse to finish the job assigned to him—because the sooner he did that, the sooner they could start looking for their friend.

  11

  BEVERLY’S FINGERS WERE STIFF AND RAW BY THE time she unraveled the knots that had held her feet, and her legs were cramped so badly she couldn’t imagine how she would ever walk again.

  But she didn’t have the luxury of taking a breather. Not when the centurion might come back at any minute.

  Taking a deep breath, she forcibly put her discomfort aside. Then she planted her hands on the floor, swung her legs into a sidesaddle position, and with a jerk rocked herself onto her knees.

  It should have been easy to get up at that point. But she had tortured her legs so, it wasn’t. It took perhaps ten seconds for her to lurch to her feet.

  Moving on trembling, uncertain legs, she made her way across the floor and through the foyer to the door. It had taken a remote control device to get her and the centurion in, but she didn’t think she would need one to get out.

  As it turned out, Beverly was wrong. The door wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard she pushed against it. Apparently, her “friend” had the only “key.”

  She slumped against the wooden surface and heaved a sigh. All right, she thought, I can’t get out. But I can free my hands before he comes back.

  The centurion was a magnificent fighter, but anyone could be taken by surprise. Anyone, the doctor insisted. And if that was her only chance of helping the Kevrata, she would take it.

  But she would need something sharp to slice her bonds, she thought, as she retraced her steps into the main room. A cursory scan of the place d
idn’t show her any likely objects, so she took a closer look.

  Finally she found it—a place where one of the stones in the wall had partly cracked away. The jagged edge it left was a little higher than Beverly would have liked, forcing her to get up on her toes to raise her wrists to the right height. But once she did that, she was able to begin sawing away.

  It wasn’t easy. The edge wasn’t very sharp, and her bonds were tougher than she would have imagined. But she worked at it as diligently as she could, and as she worked, she found herself looking back on her life.

  It wasn’t because Beverly expected to die, though she knew that was certainly a possibility. It was more because she had been penned up and frozen and bludgeoned about, and she wanted to go somewhere more pleasant for a while.

  Where she could gather her thoughts. Where she could reflect.

  Funny, she thought. For a long time she had been too busy to reflect, too absorbed in her work to examine the entirety of her life and achieve some kind of perspective.

  But it hadn’t always been that way. Beverly hadn’t been anywhere near that busy when Jack was alive. She had spent hours with him, even days, doing nothing at all.

  Just being with him. Just living.

  When Jack died, everything changed. She had always been strong, equal to any challenge. But she couldn’t accept what had happened, couldn’t meet it head-on.

  She needed distractions—and she found them. Work, first of all, and plenty of it. And raising Wesley. And when he started to take care of himself, she found other ways to fill her time—writing and directing plays, practicing dance routines, research, correspondence with other medical officers.

  But never just living.

  The closest she had come to it were her breakfasts with Jean-Luc. She had looked forward to them with such eagerness, each one a refreshing oasis in a wasteland of hard work. And no two of them were exactly the same. In fact, she and her breakfast partner had dedicated themselves to finding unusual dishes, which they would then serve to each other and wait for a reaction.